We study a Hotelling framework in which customers first pay a monopoly platform to enter the market before deciding between two competing services on opposite ends of a Hotelling line. This setup is common when modeling competition in Internet content provision. We find that standard...

Since Kreps and Scheinkman's seminal article (1983) a large number of papers have analyzed capacity constraints' potential to relax price competition. However, the ensuing literature has assumed that products are either perfect or very close substitutes. Therefore none of the papers has...

The economics literature generally considers products as points in some characteristics space. With more products being flexible or self-customizable to some degree, it makes sense to model products with positive measure. I develop a model of firms which can offer interval-long 'fat' products in...

This paper shows that Stackelberg has turned the Cournot competitors into monopolists, to result in Bertrand's equilibrium, and to fall into a prisoner's dilemma. This paper then applies Hotelling's theory to break the dilemma

This paper extends the traditional Hotelling's model of spatial competition by allowing firms to choose the degree of general purposeness of their products before they compete in prices. The degree of general purposeness is approximated by endogenizing the per-unit transportation cost...

We analyze the role of consumer expectations in a Hotelling model of price competition when products exhibit network effects. Expectations can be strong (stubborn), weak (price-sensitive) or partially stubborn (a mix of weak and strong). As a rule, the price-sensitivity of demand declines when...

The paper studies indirect network effects in a market composed by two incompatible intermediaries that choose price (short-term issue) in addition to location (long-term issue). The paper first shows that (i) when the network externality is sufficiently weak, only maximum differentiation...